Editorial

de Patricia Maché

In the
previous issue, there were some interesting responses to Jan’s column. A point,
which particularly caught my attention, and obviously the attention of several
readers, was Jan’s following comment: “physics and chemistry lack the scope to
explain homeopathy.”

I could
not help but spare a thought for Democritus (460-370 BC), a Greek philosopher,
who developed, with his mentor Leucippus, a theory of atoms as ultimate
matter particles. His discovery, unfortunately, did not fare well among his
contemporaries and ended up languishing in the underworld of indemonstrable
scientific theories for a very long time. He, and we, had to wait until the
beginning of the 19th century for the English chemist John Dalton to
demonstrate that, indeed, matter consists of elementary particles: the atoms.

So, it took
nearly two millennia for scientists to devise experiments capable of proving
his formidable intuition!

Democritus’ theory had also to contend with the
authorities of the time, namely Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle. The latter
exerted such an immense influence on his time and on the centuries to come that
despite being flawed, his four elements theory prevailed.

This
situation strangely resembles the one homeopathy still experiences, albeit on a
shorter time span; Science cannot prove the workings of homeopathy. Before
going further, an important distinction must be made. Democritus’ theory was based
on reason alone. His method was what is called an a priori or deductive method.
He could think an atomic theory but could not say to his detractors, “look, I
have divided matter as much as it can possibly be done, and here is what is
left; an atom.”

Homeopathy
is in an inverse position for it can say: “Look, I have given Belladonna to
this agitated patient with a pounding headache, a red face, dilated pupils, and
cold extremities and, ten minutes later, his symptoms have completely
disappeared.” It cannot, however, explain how these little pillules can have
such a healing effect. To present our case, we are using an a posteriori or
inductive method; going from the effects to the cause. Our main problem is that
we cannot from practice induce a correspondent theory. Science has not yet
found the means to explain that which can be readily observed. Nevertheless, we
have an important advantage on Democritus: we have our cake and anyone
who wants to check if it tastes good, can.

This, of
course, is not the whole story. While Democritus had his own problems with the
authorities of the time, homeopathy has the problem of facing a very active faction of the scientific
community, which, when it is not wasting its time pouring scorn on ‘the quacks’,
continues to confront us from the macrocosmic point of view of Newtonian
physics, and insists that we meet them on their limited ground. Fortunately for us, something crucial happened at
the beginning of the 20th century: Quantum physics burst onto the
scene and threw a big boulder into the scientific pond, which made waves (I
could not resist the pun) the ‘old physics’ – as Hahnemann might have called
it, had he been alive – can neither predict nor explain. From its microscopic
point of view, it demonstrated that the laws which govern the Great Machine do
not function in the same way when applied to the sub-atomic level. In other
words, Quantum physics showed that Newtonian physics, on which principles conventional
medicine still relies heavily, while valid within its limits, is not
comprehensive enough to explain all the world’s phenomena.

“Very
well,” you might say, “but what does this all mean for homeopathy?” Space being a concern, even for editors, I invite
you to share your thoughts, ideas, and suggestions on this fascinating and
promising subject. To be continued in the next edition…

I leave you with a quote from the Danish physicist Niels
Bohr, one of the founders of quantum mechanics. To Einstein’s lament : “Alas,
our theory is too poor for our experience.” Bohr replied: “No, no! Experience
is too rich for our theory.” Meanwhile,
I hope you will enjoy this month’s very interesting and extensive contributions.